A Gaming Diary
Archive for November, 2008
In The Pit Demo (360)
Nov 22nd
One of those rare games with no graphics. You play a blind monster that lives in the dark, so have to hunt by sound. A nice (if not original) idea, which works well. No way on earth I’m paying 400 points for it, though. Two hundred would be highly unlikely to make me buy it. A hundred points and I’d almost definitely give it a go, though.
A Kingdom for Keflings Demo (360)
Nov 22nd
Light, easy village building game. The sort of thing I’ll like and the wife will love. A definite pay day purchase for 800 points. Wouldn’t pay any more for it, I don’t think.
Peggle (iPod)
Nov 21st
I have done several challenges, most of them first time. At the moment they’re just normal levels with more orange pegs. The score attacks will come later and they scare me.
I’ve mostly been using the Spooky Ball as my power up, though when it looks like it’ll be useless I’ve just been going with the Magic Hat and seeing what it throws up. (Normally extra balls and super guides, the useless bloody thing.)
I have also been using my iPod to listen to music, an interesting extra feature Apple decided to include along with the ability to play Peggle.
Peggle (iPod)
Nov 18th
It’s a shame that this is so battery intensive. I played for an hour or so today and almost drained my Nano’s battery.
I did get to the last set of story levels, though.
Football Manager Handheld 2009 (PSP)
Nov 18th
So, I sorted out my team and played some games. So far, I’ve won them all. That’s three friendlies and four league matches, all wins. Mainly thanks to the players I brought in over the summer. As the transfer market has always been the think I’m worst at in the Football Manager series I’m very happy about this.
I may have to leave the club at the end of the season, though, when all the loan players I got go home.
Fallout 3 (360)
Nov 17th
Had a huge session of this on Sunday. As soon as I finished playing I tried to work out how the hours had been filled and couldn’t.
Okay, so I obtained the Declaration of Independence. I went to Arlington Library and downloaded some information. And I… er… spent a long, long time wandering around Rivet City, talking to everybody. Oh, and I went back to home in Tenpenny Tower. And found a random cavern full of raiders, who I slaughtered.
That sort of thing.
I also broke the illusion of the game completely at one point. I wanted to open the medicine cabinet in the clinic in Rivet City. I tried to pickpocket the doctor, but he caught me, took his key back and then, um, acted as if nothing had happened. So I got out my shotgun and shot him in the back of the head. Blood everywhere. But he wasn’t dead, just unconscious, and I couldn’t search his body. Ten seconds later he got up, dusted himself down and acted as if nothing had happened, welcoming me to the clinic.
Oh. Oh well.
I thought maybe there’d be more consequences. And I’d love it if it used the Morrowind system for killing NPCs, rather than using Oblivion’s unkillable NPCs. (In Morrowind you could kill anyone – if you had the skills to do so. If you killed an NPC essential to the main quest a message would appear letting you know, so you could reload your last save game. Much better than immersion-breaking immortal characters, I reckon.)
Not that any of that hurts the game in any significant way, but I always thought Fallout was about choices and consequences – it does hurt a little to have some of those choices taken away.
Football Manager Handheld 2009 (PSP)
Nov 17th
I had this sat ready to start a new game all weekend, but I didn’t dare actually click the “Start Game” button.
You see, Football Manager scares me. For two reasons. The first is that I worry my life will be over once I start a game. That my head will be full of worries about the holes in my squad to the exclusion of everything else, that instead of working I’ll be pondering tactical changes that could improve my results, etc. The second reason is that I worry the first thing won’t happen, that I’ll start the game, do a couple of friendlies and find that the suspension of disbelief necessary for the game will be unobtainable this time round.
Finally, last night, in bed, I used a random number generator (my wife) to pick my team and started a game as Oxford United. The first thing I noticed was that the board expected me to reach the playoffs. That’s never good. The next thing I noticed was that there was no depth to the squad. Only two strikers and a severe lack of players able to play on the left of defence and the right of midfield. (Or the other way round, I forget.) Luckily for me, Oxford had space in their wage budget, so I bought some players from clubs, signed a few clubless players and got some more in on loan. I now have six strikers, which might be overkill, actually.
Next up, I’m going to have to work out who to put in my first team and then, maybe, play some actual games of football. But that will probably come much, much later.
Star Trigon (iPod)
Nov 17th
Wonderful stuff, but it’s got very hard. Not only does it require very precise timing, but I’m now at the stage where I need to actually plan how to tackle a stage, rather than just wing it.
A far better game than the reviews on iTunes would suggest.
Trackmania DS (DS)
Nov 17th
Harumph, I say. Harumph!
My DS is broken. Again. It’s going to have to be repaired for about the, ooh, fourth time now? (Not to mention the times I’ve had to have other DS Lites repaired.)
The broken part is the right trigger, which only responds about fifty percent of the time when you press it on the top of the trigger and almost never when you click the edge where my finger naturally rests.
The new Castlevania uses the right trigger a lot, so I couldn’t play that, but Trackmania only uses it in menus – and then not very often. So I played a lot of Trackmania over the weekend.
The good news is that it’s very fun, the bad news is that it’s not as perfect as I thought it was. On several occasions I’ve fallen through the track at the join between track pieces and the framerate, while mostly excellent, isn’t as perfect as I first thought.
I was doing a fairly hard race last night. The first time I was going to win, I fell off the track just before the finish line. The second time I met the target time exactly, to the hundredth of the second. The time shown at the top of the screen was in blue (which means you’ve won), but I wasn’t awarded the medal. The third time I was due to win, I did.
Not massively rubbish, but a bit annoying.
